Parker.chap.5.pdf

Robert T.C. Parker

Killing, Dining, Communicating

It must, however, be remembered that in ancient religion there was no authoritative interpretation of ritual.

— Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 399

I turn now to the central ritual of Greek religion. Seeking to refute the charge that

Socrates did not “worship/believe in the same gods as the city”, Xenophon begins with an

uncomplicated argument. “First of all, what evidence did they bring that he did not believe in

the same gods as the city? For he could often be seen sacrificing at home, and often on the

public altars of the city”. The master must have been orthodox in religion because he

regularly performed the ritual that, more than any other, achieved communication with the

gods. When Plato speaks of the processes of socialization that instill piety into the young, the

scene he envisages is that of children watching their parents perform sacrifice. In the comic

fantasy of Aristophanes, the Birds seek to replace the gods as rulers of the universe; so they

instruct mankind to make sacrifice henceforth first to them and only after that to the gods 1 .

Sacrifice was, and was seen to be, the heart of the matter.

Sacrifice was also central to the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury debate

about the origins and essence of religion 2 . A phenomenon describable by that name was so

common among the socalled primitive religions that it could scarcely fail to attract attention;

an extra stimulus was that rescued mankind. This modern debate was not or was only

marginally an inheritance from the ancients. Sacrifice is our problem, not (or not prior to

Neoplatonism) 3 theirs.

1 Xen. Mem. 1.1.2; PI. Leg. 887d (above p. U); Arist. Au. 56163.

2 Cf. J. Carter, Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader (London, 2003).

For Neoplatonist explanations of the rationale and efficacy of sacrifice, see briefly Sallustius De Mundo 16, and

at length Iambl. De Myst. books 56. Cf. L. Gernet in Gernet and A. Boulanger, Le genie grec dans la religion

(Paris, 1932; repr., 1970), 234: "II n' y a pas non plus en Grece, faute d' organisation sacerdotale, ce qu' il y a eu

par exemple dans 1'Inde: une speculation religieuse sur les forces que le sacrifice met en jeu." There was, it is

true, a strand in pagan philosophical thought that declared sacrifice to be inappropriate to a philosophically

conceived deity (Varro fr. 22 Cardauns ap. Am. A dv. nat. 7.1; Seneca fr. 123 Haase ap Lactant. Div. inst. 6.25.3,

Insofar as they worried about the point, early Greeks seem to have explained

participatory sacrifice, the kind where men ate the flesh of an animal offered to the gods, as

an inheritance from the time when men and gods dined together; at a certain point, it would

appear, men and gods resolved to dine apart while still sharing the same animal, and the

unequal division of meat between men and gods had its origin in the trick played by Pro

metheus on Zeus on that occasion 4 . Sacrifice as still practiced was therefore a product of the

postgolden age world in which we now live, but a selfevident and unproblematic one. They

also had myths that explained how particular animals came first to be sacrificed or why

particular sacrificial rites were conducted as they were; 5 but the need to sacrifice to the gods

was too selfevident to require an explanation. When certain unorthodox thinkers declared

this most central of ritual acts to be, in fact, a form of impiety, their starting point was

hostility to meat eating; had they accepted meat eating, the role of sacrifice would have

remained selfexplanatory. The vegetarian Porphyry even tolerates the idea that tradition may

sometimes require animal sacrifice, but not consumption of the flesh 6 .

Paul Veyne in 2000 issued the robust but not unsubtle announcement that any attempt

to offer a general theory of sacrifice was misguided:

Sacrifice is a good example of a particular category of sociological objects: those that, by the chance

of their constitution, can combine in themselves a great number of possible meanings (even if these

are mutually contradictory) and provide a great number of diverse satisfactions: this richness makes

them popular and assures them an almost universal success, while obscuring for the conscious mind

their raison d'etre (so they seem to emerge from mysterious human depths). It is like this with

sacrifices, with pilgrimages, or, in the profane sphere, with the importance of sitting at the same table,

of eating together. These "black holes" are a kind of social trap: the most varied individuals fall into

them, have fallen into them, or will fall into them, because all or almost all the reasons for falling are

good; therefore learned discussions on "the" true meaning of sacrifice will continue without an end

and without a purpose. Its misleading impression of profundity will lead to the temptation of finding

asking, ąuae extrucidatione innocentium uoluptas est ?); we learn of it primarily through its endorsement by

Christian critics of pagan sacrifice, among which Arn. Adv. nat. 7.1—37 is the most extensive.

4 Hes. Theog. 535—61 with fr. 1.67 (cf. pp. 13940 below). J. Rudhardt, "Les myths grecs relatifs a

1'instauration du sacrifice," in his Mythe, religion, 209—26, is right that what Prometheus conducts at Mekone is

not a sacrifice, but in making the sacrifice later performed by Prometheus's son Deucalion to Zeus Phyxios

(Apollod. Bibl. 1.7.2) the true origin of the rite, he gives it a founding significance not present in the sources.

5 For the former see Porph. Abst. 2.9—10; works on aitia (Callim. Aet.; Plut. Quaest. Graec.) are full of the

latter.

Porph. Abst. 2.2.1,2.4.1.

ethological or even "abyssal" explanations. The riddle is, however, easy to solve: sacrifice is widely

distributed across centuries and across societies because this practice is sufficiently ambiguous for

everyone to find in it their own particular satisfaction 7 .

It would seem that his ban extends not just to transcultural theories of sacrifice, already

declared impossible by others 8 , but to any attempt to generalize about sacrifice within a

given culture, and even beyond that to any attempt to explain any particular form of

sacrifice, such as "killing followed by banquet," within a given culture.

Veyne's warning is altogether salutary. Any form of sacrifice may well derive its

power from responsiveness to a complex mix of human desires, fears, interests, pleasures,

and imaginings. Greek sacrifice was entirely unaccompanied by the kind of learned or

authoritative exegesis, even in the form of myth, that could have steered understanding in a

specific direction. A popular approach has been to distinguish a set of original or ideal

types, different in essence even if, as we now observe them, somewhat contaminated one

with another 9 . But no Greek ever encountered these ideal types. Growing up within the

Greek sacrificial culture meant on the one hand acquiring a familiarity with many differing

but overlapping forms of ritual killing, on the other experiencing a single sacrificial form

deployed in a variety of different contexts; one was not taught in school the different

theological presuppositions underlying the different forms, or what was the most proper

application of a form that was variously applied. The chapter that follows will be an attempt

to apply Veyne’s insight to Greek sacrifice. To analyze one must separate to some degree,

but the separation is the observer's, not the participants.

The Double Face of Sacrifice: Sacrifice as Feast, Sacrifice as

Communication

We can begin with the association between sacrifice and banąuet. Polemicists for

vegetarianism in antiquity attacked meat eating and animal sacrifice with little distinction,

because they regarded them as coextensive. Greek sacrifice is driven by gluttony, they

7 "Inviter les dieux," 2122; my translation.

See, e.g., M. Detiennes introduction to Cuisine of Sacrifice .

So, e.g., Nilsson, Geschichte, 132; and see below on Meuli and Cuisine of Sacrifice.

argued: nobody sacrifices inedible species such as elephant or camel or snake, and if Greeks

were forced to sacrifice like Semites, by burning the whole offering, leaving no edible

remnant, they would abandon the practice. 10 The idea of sacrifice as a necessary preliminary

to meat eating was central, if in a less moralizing vein, to some of the most influential

theories of Greek sacrifice in the second half of the twentieth century. The great Swiss

comparativist Karl Meuli saw Greek sacrifice in origin (an origin that he put far back among

Paleolithic hunters) as a form of ritual slaughter preparatory to a feast. 11 The division of meat

between gods and men as typically (if not wholly accurately) conceived by the Greeks

themselves was scandalously unequal: the gods received on the altar little more than the tail,

the thighbones wrapped in fat, and (in Homer, and occasionally later) small pieces of meat

cut "from all the limbs" placed on them. For Meuli, these facts showed that the logic of the

sacrifice leading to a feast (what it will be convenient to call alimentary sacrifice) was not

that of providing a gift of food to the gods at all. He compared rather the practice of hunting

peoples of giving symbolic special treatment to the bones of the animals they kill, burning

being one attested form of such special treatment. What is at issue is the perpetuation of a

supply of game. For hunting cultures, it has been brilliantly said, bones are like seeds, from

which, if properly handled, next years animals will spring; 12 the pieces of meat "from all the

limbs" suggest the restoration of the whole animal.

Few today would regard such an appeal to Paleolithic hunters as a legitimate way to

explain the sacrificial practices of the Greeks, agriculturalists and pastoralists of the first

millennium BC. 13 Even if Meuli’s highly seductive analogies illuminate the remote prehistory

of Greek treatment of sacrificial bones, for the Greeks, bones were not seeds; the burning of

10 Theophrastus ap. Porph. Abst. 2.25—26.

11 "Ein Tier wird nach herkömmlichen Ritual geschlachtet, damit es die Menshen essen": "Opferbräuche," 282.

On what exactly the gods received on the altar (on the separate issue of table offerings, see n. 70), see van

Straten, Hiera Kala, 11831,14344; for osteological evidence, see Ekroth, "Meat, Man and God," 26264;

"Thighs or Tails?" (where, p. 144, the possibility that pigs were treated differently from other animals is

mentioned). The postHomeric evidence for "small pieces" is SEG 36.206 (= GSL 3) 1617.

12 J. Z. Smith, "The Bare Facts of Ritual," in his Imagining Religion (Chicago, 1982), 5365, at 60.

13 "Animal sacrifice appears to be, universally, the ritual killing of a domesticated animal by agrarian or

pastoralist societies" (and so quite distinct from hunting): J. Z. Smith, "The Domestication of Sacrifice," in

Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation,

ed. R. G. HamertonKelly, 191205 (Stanford, 1986), at 197. A mundane alternative to Meuli's theory about the

original motive for bone burning has recently been offered: they burn well, and could serve as fuel for cooking

edible meat: Ekroth, "Thighs or Tails?" 146, with refs.

the gods' portion was a way of bringing a food offering to them – an odd way and an odd

offering, to be sure, but such is the naturę of humans' traffic with immortals. Stripped of its

Paleolithic dimension, however, the argument that a chief function of Greek sacrifice was to

prepare for the feast reappears in the highly influential collective volume edited by J. P.

Vernant and M. Detienne in 1979. The approach (further developed by these scholars and

their collaborators in several places) 14 is summed up in the volume’s title The Cuisine of

Sacrifice : this is sacrifice seen as a prelude to a collective meal, and the distribution of meat

at that meal, between gods and men and among men, becomes the dominant theme.

Vernant writes that "the ceremony of sacrifice could be defined as the complex of

procedures permitting an animal to be slaughtered in such conditions that violence appears to

be excluded and the killing unequivocally has a character which distinguishes it clearly from

murder." And, as he put it in explicit dialogue with Walter Burkert, who in Homo ecans

(1972) had transposed Meuli into a quite different key, "To sacrifice is fundamentally to kill

in order to eat. But, within this formulation, you put the accent on the killing, I put it on the

eating." 15 For Meuli, sacrifice ensured that the killing required by hunting would not

terminate the food supply. For Vernant, it licensed killing by ritualizing it. For both theories,

as for the ancient vegetarians, it was inextricably bound up with meat eating.

Both theories take up an idea already found in ancient texts that the culpable violence

inherent in sacrifice was ritually disguised: the fatal knife was hidden beneath the barley

grains in the sacrificial basket, water was sprinkled on the victim's head to induce it to nod

assent to its killing (and there were many stories of animals presenting themselves

spontaneously for the slaughter). At the Attic festival of Dipolieia, 16 the killing of an ox led to

a mock trial: the outcome was the condemnation not of a human but of the knife or ax that

did the deed, and the ox's corpse was even stuffed with straw, set on its feet, and yoked to a

plow, as though it were not dead at all. For this complex of ritual evasions Karl Meuli coined

14 See, e.g., J. L. Durand and A. Schnapp, in City of Images, 5370; J. L. Durand, Sacrifice et labour en grece

ancienne (Paris, 1986).

15 "Theorie generale du sacrifice et mise a mort dans la thysia grecque," in Sacrifice dans 1'antiąuite, 121,

with discussion 2239, at 7 and 26 (English version without the discussion in Vernant, Mortals and Immortals,

290302). Professor G. Flood refers me to the exegesis by Hindu Mimamsaka philosophers of how Vedic

animal sacrifice (which in fact avoided bloodshed) was compatible with nonviolence: see W Halbfass, "Vedic

Apologetics, Ritual Killing, and the Foundations of Ethics," chap. 4 of his Tradition and Reflection (New York,

1991); see too McClymond, Beyond Sacrei Yiolence, 5152, with references.

16 See Parker, Polytheism, 18791.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: